The importance of automation – Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions and Jenkins-2

In the tech realm, automation is the bedrock of modern IT operations, spanning from automating software deployments to managing cloud resources and configuring network devices. It empowers organizations to streamline processes, enhance reliability, and remain competitive in the fast-paced digital landscape.

In essence, automation resembles an exceedingly efficient, error-free, round-the-clock workforce that empowers individuals and organizations to accomplish more with less effort.

To benefit from automation, the project management function is quickly diluting, and software development teams are transitioning to Agile teams that deliver in Sprints iteratively. Therefore, if there is a new requirement, we don’t wait for the entire thing to be signed off before we start doing design, development, QA, and so on. Instead, we break software into workable features and deliver them in smaller chunks to get value and customer feedback quickly. That means rapid software development with less risk of failure.

Well, the teams are agile, and they develop software faster. Still, many things in the software development life cycle (SDLC ) process are conducted manually, such as the fact that some teams generate CodeBuilds only after completing the entire development for that cycle and later find numerous bugs. It becomes difficult to trace what caused that problem in the first place.

What if you could know the cause of a broken Build as soon as you check the code into source control? What if you understand that the software fails some tests as soon as the builds are executed? Well, that’s CI for you in a nutshell.

CI is a process through which developers frequently check code into a source code repository, perhaps several times a day. Automated tooling behind the scenes can detect these commits and then build, run some tests, and tell you upfront whether the commit has caused any issues. This means that your developers, testers, product owners, operations team, and everyone comes to know what has caused the problem, and the developer can fix it quickly. This creates a feedback loop in software development. We always had a manual feedback loop within software development, which was slow. So, either you wait a long time before doing your next task or do the wrong thing until you realize it is too late to undo all of that. This adds to the rework effort of everything you have done hitherto.

As we all know, fixing a bug earlier in the SDLC cycle is cheaper than fixing it later. Therefore, CI aims to provide continuous feedback on the code quality early in the SDLC. This saves your developers and the organization a lot of time and money on fixing bugs they detect when most of your code is tested. Therefore, CI helps software development teams develop better software faster.

Since we’ve mentioned Agile, let’s briefly discuss how it compares with DevOps. Agile is a way of working and is silent on the tools, techniques, and automation required to achieve it. DevOps is an extension of the Agile mindset and helps you implement it effectively. DevOps focuses heavily on automation and looks at avoiding manual work wherever possible. It also encourages software delivery automation and seeks to amplify or replace traditional tools and frameworks. With the advent of modern DevOps, specific tools, techniques, and best practices simplify the life of a developer, QA, and operator. Modern public cloud platforms and DevOps provide teams with ready-to-use dynamic infrastructure that helps businesses reduce the time to market and build scalable, elastic, high-performing infrastructure to keep enterprises live with minimal downtime.

When introducing modern DevOps in the first chapter, we discussed that it usually applies to modern cloud-native applications. I’ve built an example microservices-based Blog App to demonstrate this. We will use this application in this and future chapters of this book to ensure seamless development and delivery of this application using modern DevOps tools and practices. We’ll look at the sample application in the next section.